Monday, January 06, 2014

a return to routine

Resuming our home routines today after the holiday break was enjoyable, more so because on Saturday afternoon after unpacking our bags and tidying the house, I took time while the girls napped to make out my lesson plans for this week. It really makes or breaks my week if I have almost every detail planned out.

We have so many different avenues we spend time on, so many interests we talk and learn about, so many ideas for play, our day does not suffer from being dull, although it can feel overwhelming at times.
Today we resumed our Training Hearts, Teaching Minds catechism questions, reviewing what is justification and starting what is adoption.
We picked up our Bible reading in the middle of 2 Samuel and forced our memories to recite more than half of Psalm 145. We sang out of our hymn books and read aloud some poems. We prayed. We started a new nature calendar for the month of January and started the first half of Naming Nature with January, since we already completed the second half when we started in September.
For extra diagramming practice, we diagrammed four sentences, two with conjunctions and compound verbs and two question sentences that needed to be rephrased as statements with Digging into Diagramming. For extra grammar practice, we dissected one sentence with a mild interjection and alliteration in Practice Island and discussed the meaning of addled. (For Practice Island, I only bought the Teacher's Manual, so I just write the sentences for each day, including the diagramming ones in a notebook for Seth to write on.)
We read aloud about Chile, Bolivia and Peru fighting over mining rights in the driest desert place on earth in the mid 1800s. We learned about the building of the Suez Canal and discussed how debt caused the Egyptian government to lose control of the canal to Great Britain and the biblical problems with debt. Seth gave loose narrations of both events.

And that ended our Morning Time. (If you need inspiration for a Morning Time of your own, please read Cindy's October entries dedicated solely to Morning Time. It was a wonderful series and helped me add the extra diagramming and grammar into our Morning Time routine. This was the first post and then the series went everyday in October 2013.)

We took a break for lunch and after the girls were settled for a quiet time/nap, we reviewed previous prepositional phrase lessons in our First Language Lessons, Level 4 grammar book and reminded ourselves how they are diagrammed especially when there are more than two in a sentence along with a direct or indirect object thrown in for fun.
We dug back into our All About Spelling lessons by finally starting Level 6 with some much needed review about why English words do not end in the long o sound of spelled -oa and when to use the /j/ spelling of -dge. We practiced syllabification rules and discussed again how the r controls vowels in syllables. We laughed at how easy it is to come up with homophones and word riddles in the English language because we have such a rich vocabulary.
We read again about King Alfred and the Cakes in our Classical Writing books and Seth asked what ill-natured meant. We re-wrote a statement sentence three times from the story in order to make into a question, a command and an exclamatory sentence. That is always fun. We re-wrote a dialogue sentence from the story to use two other types of utterance words. Our sentence was "You lazy fellow!", she cried. Seth re-wrote it to say, "You lazy fellow!", she howled and "You lazy fellow!", she shouted. Again more fun with words and more fun for me because I pick out what we can do with the story.
And we finished our lessons with going over a portion of a Lingua Latina test that we both struggled through many weeks ago. And we encouraged ourselves that we gave more correct answers this time, with perhaps only a few concepts to work on before we go to the next chapter. I have found for me, Latin is a puzzle that if I give my time to study it, I can figure it out, but it is not a pick-up-and go subject for me. I must soak my mind in it in order to solve and understand its grammar and usage.
We decided to wait on starting our third Swallows and Amazons title, Winter Holiday since it was already 4:30 in the afternoon.

It was a good day, even if the girls' play made our house temporarily look like every cupboard, shelf and basket had exploded inside our home. But a quick tidy and all was mostly well again. Finding homes for their new toys and belongings is the challenge for this month but bringing order is part of what we are doing here at home.
Seth did not complete any independent work today like typing, map-drawing, reading and narrating from various non-fiction books, copywork, etc. But I also did not work with either of the girls today, so tomorrow is another day for more time together, even if we are sometimes doing different things.

Hello and welcome to Prone to Wander. My name is Heather and I'm so glad you're here! I am happily married to my husband, Shane and together we are raising three lively children to the glory of God. I can be found drinking tea, reading books, out in the garden, and behind my camera, but not usually all at once. Thanks for stopping by and I hope you are encouraged and inspired by your time here. I love my faithful readers and try to always reply to those who kindly comment. Thank you so much.

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If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavourable. Favourable conditions never come. ~C.S. Lewis